Fairy Tales 🧚 Yunnan Province, China

The Bright Hills of Yunnan

In Dali, Baldric frequented the crowded cafés on the main street. There, he drank strong green tea and watched with stupefaction the parade of incandescent aliens that descended into Dali from the surrounding hills. He also ambled slowly between the rice paddies, flush with lime-coloured shoots. The paddies formed a great green lawn, spreading gently down from the base of Mount Erhai to the lake of the same name. 

One day he was resting on a thin raised path between two rice-fields when he saw several tribal girls with straw baskets on their heads. As they walked toward him, he was struck by the colourful jackets and hats they wore. The explosion of colour was offset with hair and eyes that were black as coal. He imagined them as incandescent aliens, whose bodies went from red to infrared, and from there to outer space.

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The Bat Cave

Sitting on a patch of raised ground between the rice paddies, Baldric also noticed that some of the tribespeople were covered in pink war-paint, just like the Indians back home. They seemed to have popped up from a nearby crevice at the foot of Mount Erhai, and were buzzing and jumping in the air. Their feet hardly seemed to touch the ground. They made Baldric think of Mexican jumping beans that had been steeped in radioactive isotopes. Their bodies were literally humming with an incandescent pink glow. But he had seen so many outlandish and brightly-dressed tribespeople recently that he hardly gave it a second thought. It must have been the strong green tea he drank in the main-street café. Little did Baldric know that these were members of the notorious Baulomorph Pink Guard, commonly referred to as the Pinkertons.

The Pinkertons did the dirty-work of their government, which had tasked them with using bats to experiment on the human population. SARS 1 was just a trial run. The plan was to unleash a virus so unpleasant that the humans would be frightened to tell each other about it. And when the information finally got out, even the most powerful man in the world wouldn’t have a clue what to do. Being privy to the CIA’s information, he would be scared stiff. He would imagine the stock market falling and the chairs of his casinos empty. The Pinkertons predicted that he would deny everything, even to the point of telling his citizens that the deadly virus was just a Spring flu that will go away in a few weeks. He would tell them to go about their business as usual, drink bleach, fight universal health care, and buy more guns. And all the while, the virus would be eating away at them, making them even less capable to defend themselves.

The Pinkertons predicted that the most powerful man in the world would get up on his podium and say things like, Don’t let the weakness overcome you. Be like me and dominate this tiny little flu. Tame it with your will! He who doesn’t wish to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, doesn’t have the right to exist. Das ist mein Kampf. And above all, don’t give in to the tyranny of washing your hands or wearing masks!

In the general chaos that would follow, the humans would be glad of whatever assistance they could get, from any quarter. They would even welcome pink liberators from the sky. The Baulians would just bide their time until then. The official slogan from Jojo, chief of the Pinkertons, was “Bide-a-Wee.”

This was the Baulian plan, at any rate. Yet the bats were being difficult. Given the earlier SARS 1 public-relations disaster, the bats refused to go anywhere near the civets. The last thing they needed was more bad press. The humans were capable of blaming anything on anyone. They even called a mad, blood-drinking Romanian a vampire bat! It was all so ridiculous and infuriating — and this from a species that couldn’t even fly. The last thing the bats of Yunnan would do is go near a civet. So the Baulians were giving the pangolins a try.

The foremost human magazine on alien sightings, Quante Extraterrestre, published a front-page article with the headline, “Aliens Seen Leaving Bat Caves in China.” But no one paid any attention. The scientific community ridiculed them for trying to cash in on the latest craze for bat men, bat women, dark knights, and blood-sucking vampires. One influential blogger wrote off the article as a crude attempt to blame China for the shortcomings of the West.

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A Skyful of Aliens

Anytime humans talked about aliens, they were branded lunatics. All the media cared about was Communists versus Capitalists, Social Justice Warriors versus Proud Boys, AOC’s razor-sharp teeth versus Miley Cyrus’ wrecking ball.

While humans got into heated debates about these things, aliens were infiltrating their world like gamma rays. For instance, political scientists assumed that the Bai considered the Western border of China to be fictitious because of a political reason: they didn’t recognize Chinese sovereignty. Yet nothing could be further from the truth! They didn’t recognize any human borders at all, at least not since they signed a pact with the Yellow Skywalkers who had taken power in Beijing during the Han Dynasty.

According to the guide-books, the Bai people had lived for the last 4000 years around Lake Erhai and in the bright green hills of Yunnan Province. Yet what the guide-books didn’t say was that 30% of the Chinese population, and 72% of the minorities, had immigrated from outer space. The Shang immigrants came from the Shangalang galaxy (in the Yellow Sky universe) and the minorities came mostly from the Golden Horde galaxy (in the Microscopium supercluster in the Purple Pulse universe). The Golden Horders were such a tricky, secret race that even the Fractal Masters of Vicino Prossimo had never heard of them. And yet their operatives were everywhere in China.

If the minorities in China ever kowtowed to anyone (which they never did), it would be to the Shang Skywalkers. This wasn’t because the Golden Horders weren’t tough. They were. Rather, it was because the Skywalkers were tougher. Along with the Fallarians and the Frozen Skiffers, the Yellow Skywalkers were the terror of the Kraslika. And yet like the Russians (who were 25% Fallarian), they weren’t completely impossible to get along with. In China, the Skywalkers were happy to let the Horders carry on their little displays of colour and fun, as long as they didn’t interfere with the Belt and Road Initiative, the production of rare earth minerals, or the general plan of taking over everything.

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The Bai tribespeople may have looked primitive, yet they routinely beamed information about flora and fauna, and about the gradient purity of the water in Lake Erhai. The Golden Horde were particularly interested in what they called The Conjunction Point, from where the Irawaddy, Salween, Mekong and Yangtze flowed south. They drew a big red circle around this point, and then drew another line from this point to another, which they called The Dispersal Point, out of which flowed the Brahmaputra, the Ganges, and the Indus (they marked this point with a big red X). Between these points lay the plateau of Tibet, which they intended to make their capital district.

The Horders had elaborate plans for their capital region, the Goldkhanate, and for their sparkling new capital city, Goldkhana. They would need to fill several valleys and flatten several mountain ranges, but it would be the envy of the Kraslika. In the evenings, sound and light shows would project the auras of their famous acrobats, the Spiral Dancers, creating concentric radiant pulses into the unknown. The tinkling of their headdress bells would be refracted into the depths of the Black and Purple Pulse universes, where home audiences would slurp their noodles and grind their pincers in ecstasy. The Golden Khan itself would become the tourist destination du siècle, entertaining aliens from all over the Kraslika, from the blinding pinnacles of Vicino Prossimo to the desolate black gulfs of Fallar Prime.

The Horders were an ambitious lot. They agreed that it would be easier to let the Baulians do the grunt work of terraregenerating the planet. Once it was all cleaned up, they would get the signal and the orange beams that the Baulians used to pacify the earthlings would shift to yellow, like lasers from the sun. The yellow arrows would be aimed at the pink marshmallows just long enough for them to surrender. If they didn’t surrender, they would be put on the end of long spears, heated till they puffed up, and burst into flames. Tibet would then become the Las Vegas of the Kraslika, and the show would go on forever. Of course, the Han Dynasty (which had never really ended) would get 51% of the profits.

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The politics of the cosmos played out all around him, yet Baldric was only interested in the bright clothing and the tinkling headdresses of the pretty girls heading his way. He wondered what the hill-tribe girls would think about the clothing of the invading foreigners from Melbourne and Zurich. What sloppy and unimaginative dressers they were! Luckily, Baldric himself was safe from such criticism, sporting as he did an aquamarine shirt, a pair of brightly coloured Bermuda shorts, and — atop his shiny corn-yellow hair — a fluorescent green fishing cap, complete with hooks, spinners, and weights that dangled like the finest heirlooms a hill-tribe girl could desire. Though immune to censure, Baldric suspected that the backpackers at his hotel would be more severely judged. How primitive they looked in their On-The-Road army shirts and baggy Post-India trousers!

If the white foreigners were to be judged harshly, how would the Chinese be sentenced? Clearly they would be the objects of intense hatred because of their brutal and demoralizing invasion of monochrome blue and green denim. Even though the cult of Mao had been dead for decades, and no one wore buttons with his image anymore, the Bai were still traumatized by the memory of their blue and green uniforms taking over their streets.

Surely this was the real root of animosity between the Bai people and the Han Chinese. Why did historians insist on political explanations when the black and white, the blue and green of the matter was right in front of their eyes?

Baldric became less interested in this political debate as the three girls tried to manoeuvre their way around him on the narrow raised aisle of dirt. He formulated this mathematically: his interest in the political situation was inversely proportional to the distance between him and the approaching girls. Although excited by the possibilities of inverse proportionality, he couldn’t help noticing that one of the girls looked down at him as she slid her golden ankle around his bright white tennis shoe. For a split second, her eyes flashed purple and violet, and then faded back into dark brown. On her face was an enticing smile, the type that made him think of his childhood sweetheart, Alicia de Mires, and how she once beckoned him into Wonderland to taste the boysenberry jam on the bread and butter of her soft, olive skin.

As the hill-tribe girl nodded her head to him in greeting, the small bells on her headdress tinkled faintly. He assumed this was her way of saying that she admired the bright shorts he was wearing. Perhaps she wondered where he bought them, or whether she could make a similar design. Would she need to import the fabric, or could she weave and dye the cotton herself? Or perhaps she was wondering about the sparkling spinner and lead weight on his fishing hat, an auspicious combination he used to catch a ling cod off the coast of Vancouver. On that occasion, his father threw an empty hook into the water just after his son yelled that there was something on the end of his line. But could the girl possibly know all this? And if she had found out about it, then was she secretly laughing at him for not having the guts to snip his father’s line? 

After several minutes, he found himself no longer daydreaming about the twenty pound ling cod, but about the girl with the tinkling headdress. Why did they call it a dress when it was so clearly a hat? And what was inside this dress that was so secret that it must be hidden by red and silver trinkets? And why, if it was to be kept secret, did she draw attention to it with so many tassels and bells?

Baldric wondered what might happen if he had the guts to talk to the girl. Once they had exchanged pleasantries about cross-stitching and double-ended crochet hook patterns, would she invite him up a steep path into the high mountains of a fantasy world beyond time?

Would she feed him white juicy parts of a chicken that had been thrown into the fire, and fill his stomach with wine distilled from gooseberries and other paradisiacal fruits? And would she, after the sun had set over the amber hills, take his soft white limbs in the middle of the night and hold them beneath her strong body? And would she understand him when he cried out, Ow! You’re crushing my spine! ?

When Dawn placed his rosy fingers o’er the western hills, would her father kill him just as well as look at him? Would he let his daughter be married to a monster from across the deep waters? Did Baldric not represent a way of life that was completely at odds with the last ten thousand years? Did he not come from a land where people didn’t even use their feet to go from one store to the next, and where milk didn’t come from cows but from a waxy paper box? 

Baldric thought back to his first day in China. From Hong Kong, he took a short train ride to Guangzhou. There he visited the old market, where he saw a butcher chop the head off what looked like an English bloodhound. He wrote the following account, as a sort of testament to his naïveté: 

It is comforting to think that fishes don’t know anything, that pigs haven’t developed that higher function in the brain that we call thinking, or that dogs can’t believe. It is in fact presumptuous. It is in fact a sumptuous feast, prepared in the dirty market, next to the chicken smoked in exhaust fumes, three days standing, kneeling, praying for some sucker to put it out of its miserable non-existence.

Over an open pit I see man’s best friend crackling, skin of hound, quartered and drawn tight over a treacherous fire, sliced up the vein of the tongue and his bloody jaw split in two. In the middle of his task, the butcher looks up at me, in amusement at my astonishment.

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Putting on a phoney British accent, Maria commented, “Ah, Ragor my dear chapping, this poem so very autistic.” Her friend Elee just laughed and said it only confirmed everything she’d seen: “In Pilipinas, all tourist so fearing rats. Always jumping jumping out of alley. Even them are fraidy cats. Even tiny little mouse, minding-own-business cockroach, make great big fear. Not like Australia sheep farmer. Remember, Maria, in Banau? He like big wooly thing. He no fraid. After, we come outside on porch of bungalow, see you and Ragor, love birds pecking pecking only on beautiful hill top. Remember we talk in restaurant, and Ragor so fraid, he say “hill-tribe head-hunters.” So clueless. Ingot tribe, very nice people, but Ragor thinking big pot Ingot making tourist soup. Ragor for sure big fraidy cat.” 

Ragor bristled at Elee’s distortion of the historical and political context: “That’s hardly the point, Elee. If you knew what was in those hills, you would’ve been twice as afraid. It wasn’t just the history of the head-hunters. What about the New People’s Army?”  

“What, me? Fraid of pinky pink NPA? You dreaming heavy now! I not the one with travelling cheque and camera. What I care if they taking me and making me sing pinky pink song about growing rice and choppng foreigner? That nothing to me.” 

For the record, Ragor had to admit she had a point. Canadians think they can roam the world as equals with peasants and Untouchables. Wouldn’t it be more honest to drop all that and just act like an American? That was Antonio’s view, and perhaps he was right. A Canadian would listen to the New People’s Army and then do a CBC documentary about it. But if push came to shove, they’d side with the Americans, who’d shoot first, and set up a phoney inquiry later. 

Unlike the Blue Dreamers, humans don’t learn much from their history. And yet Ragor also read in The Manchester Guardian that what humans learn from history is that they don’t learn from history. The paradox gave him hope.

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As Baldric reached the backstreets of town, he saw men playing billiards on rickety tables with peacock-blue felt. Baldric sauntered through the village in slow motion, surrendering to the lazy sway of time, the tide of the incoming darkness. Yet all of a sudden he caught a terrifying glimpse of a woman in an old-fashioned beauty salon: electric clippers with long black cords were curling her hair, the snaking coils spitting down their venom in order to transform East Asian straightness into a wily garden of tangles. For one second the image of Medusa popped into his mind, and he imagined himself floundering in a wild gooseberry barbecue, his burnt limbs writhing amongst the red-hot coals. The hill-tribe girl was poking his thigh with a wooden stick, to see if he was done.

Yet this seemed almost preferable to returning to his hotel room. Not that he was frightened to make his way through the alley of rats. He had made it through his father’s Bedtime Maze of Horrors so many times that even the Tunnels of Hell seemed like a pinball game to him. In fact he rather looked forward to the eager smiles of his rodent friends and to their frolicsome leaps across his sneakered feet. What he was afraid of, however, was being alone in his freezing room, with only The China Guidebook and a thermos of hot water to keep him company. Even the thick cement walls were against him, for they kept out his tiny clawed friends, and, with them, any hope of a late night Tea Party.

He could of course still dream of Alicia, his one and only love. He could dream of her winsome smile and her puzzling logic, her slender hands and the way she pressed her lips into the hollows of his neck. But then he would think of how little time they had spent together before his father tore them apart, a course of action which Antonio considered justified once he found out that his son was in love and wasn’t merely using her as a plaything. He thought of Alicia while he held a cup of steaming water between his cold hands and wondered where she was

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Next: 🎲 The Chancemasters of Die

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